Majoring in History

Majoring in History

Look through an exceptionally global lens and use a variety of methods to explore your interests. As a history major, you might make a short film, write historical fiction, create a museum exhibit or collect oral histories from immigrants. Faculty have expertise in China, Japan, India, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Andes, Pan-Africa and the American West, South and New England. In your junior and senior years, you take small seminars in your area of specialization, exploring important historical texts and issues with other students and professors. The writing, speaking, thinking and research skills you gain as a history major will give you a strong foundation for a variety of pursuits. Some graduates move into high-tech companies, advertising firms and media companies. Others pursue advanced studies in history and other fields or go into teaching, law or business.

Research opportunities

You have many opportunities to pursue your own research interests. Our challenging program and creative environment has inspired work as diverse as a cultural history of the Outer Banks at the time of the Wright brothers' first flight and a thesis on the theories and practices of non-racialism in South Africa.

International opportunities and study abroad

We encourage you to travel to do primary research for your studies. Our students have recently done work in India, Cairo, Rome, Tokyo and Berlin. Faculty have led trips to the Mexican border to study immigration and to key locations of the civil rights movement.

Learn more about Connections, Connecticut College's innovative new curriculum.

People You Might Work With

Dean Accardi

Assistant Professor of History

Dean Accardi is an historian of gender and religion in South Asia and the Islamic World. He is interested in the connections between religious and political practices, institutions and discourses in the early modern and modern world. His research focuses on the gendered ascetic practices of saints revered by both Hindus and Muslims and their use to establish and articulate religious and political power.

Henryatta Ballah

Henryatta L. Ballah is a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Africa. Her scholarly research and teaching focus on ‘bottom up’ history, meaning an emphasis on ideas and methods of ordinary people dealing with complex issues within their particular historical moments. She teaches courses on African Women, Pre-colonial Africa, Colonial Africa, Youth and Social Movements in Africa. Her research has been published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and in the Journal of West African History. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming volume, Changing Perspectives on African Women and Gender (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Spring 2019). Ballah’s research has been presented at numerous conferences, both domestic and international. In 2012, she was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award by The Panhellenic Association and the Interfraternity Council at The Ohio State University.

Michael Cangemi

Visiting Assistant Professor of History

Michael Cangemi is an historian of US diplomatic and foreign relations history. He is interested in the ways that domestic politics, religion, and social movements influenced US relations with Central America during the Cold War.

David Canton

Associate Professor of History, Director of the Africana Studies Program

David Canton believes that African-American urban history illustrates the impact of racism, classism, and sexism in the black community. It also provides insight to the origins of 20th century black urban poverty, civil rights struggle, black class formation, and black community development.

James T. Downs

Professor of History, Director of the American Studies Program

Jim Downs is a historian of the United States. His current book project, "The Laboring Dead: From Subjugation to Science in Global History," under contract with Harvard University Press, investigates how colonialism, slavery, and the American Civil War contributed to the development of epidemiology. He was recently an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellow at Harvard University, where he gained training in medical anthropology. While at Harvard, Downs was also a fellow at The Weatherhead Initiative on Global History.

Leo J. Garofalo

Associate Professor of History, Chair of the History Department, Social Justice and Sustainability Pathway Coordinator

Leo Garofalo teaches a first-year seminar: Castro, Che Guevara and Fifty Years of the Cuban Revolution, Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean History, Modern Latin American History: Nation and the Poverty of Progress, Rebellion and Revolutions in Latin America: Tupac Amaru to Subcomandante Marcos, History of Gender in Mexico and the Andes, Migration and Immigration in Latin America, and "Race" in Colonial Latin America.

Eileen M. Kane

Associate Professor of History, Director of the Global Islamic Studies Program

Eileen Kane is a historian of modern Russia and Eurasia interested in comparative and global approaches to history. Her research and teaching focus on modern Russia, and she always seeks to consider Russia within broader histories of Europe, Eurasia and the world. Her interests include empires, migrations, religion and historical connections between the Russian and Ottoman empires.

Ellen Maloney

Frederick S. Paxton

Fred Paxton sees himself as both a humanist and a social scientist. He regularly teaches courses on European history from 200 A.D. to the present, early Islamic history from Muhammad to the Mongols, and History 101, "Big History: From the Big Bang to the Future of the Cosmos." Recent advanced courses have included New Approaches to World History, The Middle Ages in Big Historical Perspective: Northwestern Eureope and the American Southwest, 400-1400 A.D. and The Carolingian Age in Europe.

Sarah A. Queen

Professor of History, Global Capitalism Pathway Coordinator

Sarah Queen's primary research examines China's philosophical and religious foundations as it was expressed in early texts written by practitioners of the Confucian and Daoist traditions. Her research focuses on the ways in which these two traditions shaped early ethical and spiritual norms, conceptions of the body, state, and cosmos as well as Confucian and Daoist self-cultivation as distinctive forms of religious experience.

Catherine M. Stock

Barbara Zaccheo Kohn '72 Professor of History

Catherine Stock is the author of Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain. She is also the author of Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains, plus the introduction to Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics, by Howard Roberts Lamar.

Lisa H. Wilson

Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of American History

Lisa Wilson focuses her present research on North America and the Caribbean. She has recently begun a project comparing the experiences of seventeenth-century women in Barbados, Bermuda, Virginia and New England. She has published on topics such as widowhood, manhood, and stepfamilies in Early America.

Early Chinese cultural history; The spiritual and philosophical dimensions of Confucianism and Daoism; Confucianism in East Asia Today (Confucianism and Human Rights; Confucianism and Democratization; and Confucianism and Ecology)

Catherine M. Stock, Barbara Zaccheo Kohn '72 Professor of History

B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Yale University

Rural radicalism, domestic terrorism; Social, cultural and political history of the United States, 1877 to present, including the American West; Rural America

Lisa H. Wilson, Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of American History

B.A., Franklin and Marshall College; M.A., Ph.D., Temple University

Colonial North America; Women and gender; Family history

What Our Graduates Are Doing Now

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Analyst

State of Connecticut

Chief Court Administrative Judge

SKY Investment Group LLC

Chief Financial Officer

WGBH Boston

International Sales Manager

Atlantic Monthly Group

Publisher

About Connecticut College

Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into action as citizens in a global society. A leader in the liberal arts since 1911, the College is home to nationally ranked programs for internships, community action, arts and technology, environmental studies and international studies. Our beautiful 750-acre arboretum campus is located in the historic New England seaport community of New London.

CONNECTIONS is Connecticut College's reinvention of liberal arts education. It is a new kind of curriculum that lets you integrate your interests into a meaningful educational pathway, to carry you through college and into a fulfilling, effective career and life.